Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/225

Rh no means encountered at the same point of time in every district. In the case of the Danish peat, for example, we get no farther back than the recent period of our Chronological Table (p. 7), and then meet with the boulder clay; and it is the same in the valley of the Clyde, where the marine strata contain the ancient canoes before described (p. 47), and where nothing intervenes between that recent formation and the glacial drift. But we have seen that, in the neighbourhood of Bedford (p. 155p. 163 [sic]), the memorials of man can be traced much farther back into the past, namely, into the post-pliocene epoch, when the human race was contemporary with the mammoth and many other species of mammalia now extinct. Nevertheless, in Bedfordshire as in Denmark, the formation next antecedent in date to that containing the human implements is still a member of the glacial drift, with its erratic blocks.

If the reader remembers what was stated in the Eighth Chapter, p. 144, as to the absence or extreme scarcity of human bones and works of art in all strata, whether marine or fresh-water, even in those formed in the immediate proximity of land inhabited by millions of human beings, he will be prepared for the general dearth of human memorials in glacial formations, whether recent, post-pliocene, or of more ancient date. If there were a few wanderers over lands covered with glaciers, or over seas infested with ice-bergs, and if a few of them left their bones or weapons in moraines or in marine drift, the chances, after the lapse of thousands of years, of a geologist meeting with one of them must be infinitesimally small.

It is natural, therefore, to encounter a gap in the regular sequence of geological monuments bearing on the past history of man, wherever we have proofs of glacial action having prevailed with intensity, as it has done over large parts of Europe and North America, in the post-pliocene period. As